Category talk:Hebrew letter names

Deletion debate

The following information passed a request for deletion.

This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.

---

Category:Hebrew letter names

Category:Arabic letter names

All Semitic languages appear to have pretty much the same letter names in English (with some of them language-specific?, and some minor variations alef : alif etc.), and I suggest merging them all into one category, e.g. Semitic alphabets letter names. --Ivan Štambuk 09:14, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

Keep all. —Ruakh_TALK 09:21, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

But why? This would require us to generate other superfluous categories: Category:Phoenician/Aramaic/Syriac/Ge'ez letter names, all containing the same content. We have dee categorized into Category:Latin letter names, no into Category:English letter names, Category:German letter names etc. There is no point in keeping these, because the meanings of those English words is not Hebrew-, Arabic-, Syriac- Ge'ez- etc. specific, it's general and applies to all Semitic alphabets. --Ivan Štambuk 09:34, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

Here are two important facts:

• These categories contain names of letters of the Arabic script, Hebrew script, among Greek, Latin and other scripts, not individual languages.
• Categories for scripts are differentiated from categories for languages by the word "script". Some examples are Category:Katakana script, Category:Latin script templates and Category:Greek script languages.

Then, I suggest moving Category:Hebrew letter names to Category:Hebrew script letter names and Category:Arabic letter names to Category:Arabic script letter names. --Daniel. 09:52, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

But why do that? There are no such separate meanings in English, that would justify such fine-grained topical subcategorization. In English aleph, beth, gimel etc. have more general senses when referring to all Semitic alphabets. We'd be effectively creating a dozen categories all containing the same entries, with a minor difference here and there. --Ivan Štambuk 10:33, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

I disagree. alif, for example, is not used in reference to Hebrew א, at least not by people who know what they're talking about. Conversely, I don't think that aleph is ever used in specific reference to Arabic ا, though it's frequently used in generic reference to a higher-level abstraction of which Hebrew א and Arabic ا are both less-abstract instantiations, as well as in specific reference to Hebrew א. —Ruakh_TALK 11:00, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

Keep all per Ruakh. Mglovesfun (talk) 11:06, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

There are trivial differences such as alef : alif which I mentioned, but they're exceptions rather then rules. In general, when you say aleph in English, you don't mean "Hebrew aleph", "Arabic aleph", but rather that generic sense which you mention. You can make up infinite number of "specializations" for every word, but that doesn't mean it's worth a separate dictionary definition, which must be as extensive as possible. It makes no sense to have a dozen definition lines for every Semitic abjad letter name, every definition line being "The name of the xth letter in the Y alphabet", and each with a separate category. --Ivan Štambuk 11:40, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

Re: "In general, when you say aleph in English, you don't mean 'Hebrew aleph', 'Arabic aleph', but rather that generic sense which you mention": Sorry, but I don't think that's true. Regardless, the question has to do not with definition lines, but with categories. A single sense can merit inclusion in both Category:Physics and Category:Chemistry; this is no different. —Ruakh_TALK 12:57, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

Well I think it pretty much holds true. Quick Google Books search confirms this: aleph is used a a general-purpose term in Semitic abjads. It is only in specific instances of discussion that it conveys specific meaning "Hebrew aleph", "Ugaritic aleph" and so on. These letters have the same name (or with trivial differences, deserving to be covered in usage notes), usually denoting the same or similar sounds. According to your reasoning, we should replace the definition at dee#Noun from "The name of the Latin script letter D/d." into hundreds of definitions "A letter in English alphabet", "A letter in German alphabet", "A letter in Polish alphabet" and so on. Yes, it takes a specific context to disambiguate what particular language the letter name refers to when it's used, or whether it's used generically (e.g. in plural), but the letter name is the same in all cases.

Your analogy with chemistry and physics is not relevant because this is not a topical categorization issue. There is no topic "X alphabet" that letter names are used in. The proper topical category is: letter names in Semitic alphabets/abjads, and that's what I'm advocating as a replacement for these ill-named clones of each other. --Ivan Štambuk 16:22, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

I dunno, for me a quick b.g.c. search for "aleph" only turns up references to the letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Your comparison to English and German is wrong, because English and German are generally considered to have a single alphabet using the same letters, whereas the modern Semitic abjads, alphabets, and abugidas are usually considered to be separate-but-related scripts. Experts in the field may well think of the letters as single entities, but if so, I think they're in the minority. —Ruakh_TALK 18:25, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

By searching with option "Limited preview and full view", disregarding cases where the word is used in non-linguistic sense or in other languages, the results are: Old Aramaic on the first page of hits, Akkadian and Ugaritic on the second. Unfortunately, the search results are dominated by Jewish/Hebrew usage, particularly in non-linguistic senses, but as can be seen from even from this quick experiment, the meaning is most definitely not confined, neither to Hebrew, no to other particular Semitic tongues. Furthermore, as it appears, it is also generalized to the sense "Semitic glottal stop", as it can be seen from the usage in Akkadian grammar.

The fact that English and German use the same alphabet is immaterial. It does not matter which alphabet they use, but how are the letters in those alphabets called. For example, if the letters in the Gothic or Glagolitic alphabets were also called a, bee, cee, dee, aitch and so forth in English, I would support that these all be both defined in a single definition line, and sorted into one and the same category. Once again, this is about meanings of English words aleph, beth, gimel... which should be categorized according to their lexicographically relevant meanings, not all the possible specialized senses that they could be used in. I suspect that Hebrew grammarians also used the same Hebrew names when they refer to cognate/similar letter names and sounds in other Semitic languages. --Ivan Štambuk 18:52, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

Keep all per Ruakh, renaming per Daniel. if that's consistent with other categories. (Actually, I have no problem putting all letter names in one big category. But I don't think that that'll fly.)​—msh210℠ 16:37, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

Why do you think it wouldn't work? It's at most 40-50 words (most of which are variant spellings/forms). --Ivan Štambuk 16:48, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

It would work IMO. it wouldn't fly (4. (intransitive) (colloquial, of a proposal or idea) To be accepted.).​—msh210℠ 16:53, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

Wait, what? Do you mean that you think there would be only 40-50 words in all the letter name categories? Every name across dozens of scripts combined? --Yair rand (talk) 20:23, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

That was indented as a reply to my comment, but I'm not the one who said 40–50.​—msh210℠ 16:24, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

Keep, only rename if other similar categories (Category:Latin letter names) are also renamed as such. One letter name category per script, one definition per script. I don't know the Arabic letter names, but if WP's navbox on Arabic is correct, it seems to have all the letter names entirely different from Hebrew's except for the similarity between aleph and alif. --Yair rand (talk) 20:23, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

Kept. Mglovesfun (talk) 16:44, 10 September 2010 (UTC)